Colleges develop policies to ensure socially responsible athletes

J.S.Carras/The Record UAlbany coach Will Brown admits he doesn’t follow his student-athletes on social media, but says he a framework in place with his assistant coaches to ensure members of the men’s basketball team are socially responsible.

TROY >> More often than not, college athletes are smart about what they’re posting to social media sites.

They know that what they post on the internet can stay there long after a deletion and that retweeting something doesn’t remove you from the responsibility of that sentiment. In fact, sometimes, social media can even be a positive tool in an athlete’s and a program’s mutual livelihood.

But, sometimes, college athletic programs, even local ones, have to discuss the repercussions of any potential inappropriate social media post as part of the ever evolving world of creating a policy for the internet.

“We’ve had at least multiple occasions in the four years where we’ve had our policy where we’ve had to immediately shut a student athlete’s site down,” UAlbany Director of Athletics Dr. Lee McElroy said. “Whether it was Twitter or Facebok, because of comments that were made that were derogatory and were to a particular team or individual or a class of individuals so that’s where the monitoring comes in.”

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Just as local colleges are beginning to come to terms with the idea of monitoring their student-athletes social media presence, those same programs are having to come up with ways to make sure that inappropriate comments are dealt with quickly and in the best manner possible.

It’s that same thin line that programs are walking when it comes to policying social media itself and just another level of the seemingly never-ending scope of social media and student-athletes.

“Coach makes it perfectly clear before the season to either stay off it or watch what you post,” former Hudson Valley Community College softball player Lauren Aitken said. “Not only are you getting in trouble at the college but it could also hurt you later on in life.”

Of course, shutting down a student’s online profile is certainly the last line of repercussions for what a program may deem an inappropriate post.

It isn’t as if local colleges officials are sitting in their compliancy offices, simply waiting for a student-athlete to tweet something derogatory and then immediately force them to shut everything down.

Far from it.

This is a process, just like coming up with the policy as a whole was a process, and every local college athletic department has steps that it takes way before forcing any student to no longer post on social media.

To begin with, even seeing the potentially offending post is sometimes a challenge.

The idea of monitoring hundreds of student-athletes at any given time is an uphill battle and nearly every local program depends on its individual teams to keep track of what those players are doing online.

“Each team might approach it differently,” Siena Assistant Athletic Director for Communications Jason Rich said. “It’s certainly up to a coach if they want to request all their student athletes handles.”

For coaches like UAlbany men’s basketball coach Will Brown, who is prominent on Twitter, monitoring his players, and punishing them, does not begin and end with him; this is an entire team effort.

“I’m not friends with any of them,” Brown said of following his athletes. “So my assistants know right away and say ‘hey get rid of this’ and then they’ll come in here and say ‘listen, we might have a problem.’”

“It hasn’t gotten to that because my staff does a good job of solving problems and putting out fires. But there’s been nothing that’s been negative to the point where I’ve had to get involved.”

The biggest key for local athletic programs is to keep the avenues of communication open. For these programs, nothing is accomplished by simply shutting down profiles or not allowing their student-athletes to even use social media.

Athletic directors and coaches across the country, and in the Capital District, have found that having conversations with their athletes, educating them in the do’s and dont’s of social media and making sure they understand the policy before they post is the foundation of what they’re trying to accomplish.

“If something is inappropriate, and that could be foul language, innuendos, something to a rival school or an opponent, we’ll approach our student-athlete or the coach of that student-athlete to let them know that we’ve seen something and we’re not the only one’s who have seen something,” RPI Associate Athletic Director for Communications and Compliance Kevin Beattie said. “We let them know that they need to be more careful. Not once have we had to ask a student-athlete to delete something but we don’t search for it necessarily.”

Throughout all of this, there is still the question of allowing kids to be kids and the standards that we hold student-athletes to.

At what point are programs crossing the line and at what point is social media more of a prominent discussion than the game itself?

“I think eventually this is going to wind up on the desk of the Supreme Court,” McElroy said. “That is how social media is used, not just in athletics, but in our society. I think that’s where it’s headed but until then we’re all trying to figure it out.”

For the programs themselves, maintaining a positive social media presence both as teams and as players is crucial to the outside perception of a school. But for some coaches, trying to maintain a social media policy can be more of a distraction than anything else and finding a balance between monitoring, punishing and notching tallies in the win column is a brand-new kind of game.

“It’s the same thing I tell my guys with how they conduct their daily business on a day-to-day, don’t do anything that is going to be negative to your family, the University, our program and the athletic department in general,” Brown said. “If it’s questionable, if you think it can possibly have a negative impact on any of that, then don’t do it. Don’t post it. Anything that can be perceived as negative, you don’t want to deal with it.”